Technological advances in communication infrastructures and protocols have turned standard computing devices into valuable communication tools. Computers communicate with each other, and with other electronic devices, over networks ranging from Local Area Networks (LANs) to wide reaching Global Area Networks (GANs) such as the Internet. Other electronic devices have experienced similar transformations, such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and the like. Today, these wireless devices are being used for a variety of different types of communication. For example, current mobile phone and PDA technologies have transformed these wireless devices into powerful communication tools capable of communicating voice, text or other data, documents, images, video and other multimedia content (generally referred to herein as communications).
PDAs, once the portable calendaring and organizational tool, now often include network communication capabilities such as e-mail, Internet access, etc. Conversely, mobile phones and other traditional communication devices now often include local applications such as calendars, phonebooks or other contact lists, task lists, and other organizational tools. Tools such as contact lists assist the communication device user with placing voice calls and/or directing electronic messages to intended recipients of the communications. For example, a local contacts application can be accessed by the communication device user to help the user recollect contact addresses or other identifiers, and can provide the user with a platform from which contacts can be directly designated as intended recipients of a new communication.
More particularly, when initiating voice calls, text/multimedia/e-mail messages or other communications, the user has various options to enter the address or other identifier of the recipient. For example, the user may directly enter the recipient's landline telephone number, mobile phone number, text or multimedia address, e-mail address, etc. This numeric, alpha, or alphanumeric entry can be tedious, especially for mobile users where user interface mechanisms are smaller due to limited device sizes, and because mobile users may be driving an automobile or in another situation where text entry is inconvenient. In order to reduce the number of keystroke entries required, as well as to obviate the need for users to recall recipient addresses from memory, communication devices often provide such a contact application to allow various recipient communication addresses to be stored and later retrieved.
While such a stored contact list may be useful to the user, particularly to avoid the need for the user to remember the contact addresses, it may not significantly reduce the number of required keystroke entries or navigational manipulations to search for and select the intended recipients. For example, a user who has a large number of stored contacts may need to enter a significant portion of the targeted recipient's name to present the desired recipient. Further, even where the presented contact list shortens due to entry of a portion of the targeted recipient's name, the user may still need to scroll to the correct entry. While it may be more convenient for a user to locate a targeted recipient in this manner relative to directly entering the recipient address, the search for the targeted recipient in the contact list may involve a significant number of user interface (UI) manipulations, whereby the purported user-friendly aspect of such a contact list may be frustrated. This is particularly inefficient for certain types of communications such as messaging (e.g., Short Message Service, Multimedia Messaging Service, etc.), where it is possible that only a small portion of the total contacts includes such a messaging address. For example, the user's contact list may contain hundreds of contacts, but only a small number of those contacts include a relevant address for engaging in the desired communication type. Further, a majority of messages are sent to a small number of recipients. In these cases, the user still needs to filter through all of the contacts to locate the targeted user(s), who may be among only a small subset of the contacts to which the desired communication could be sent.
Accordingly, there is a need for a manner of providing more relevant, focused lists of contacts from which the user can select the desired recipient(s). The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages over the prior art.